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Post by jonathan122 on Feb 21, 2009 0:57:12 GMT
Dark Entries by Robert Aickman (Fontana 1964) The School Friend Ringing the Changes A Choice of Weapons The Waiting Room The View Bind Your Hair "Six curious and macabre stories of love, death and the super-natural." Aickman's first full-length collection of horror stories was published a full 13 years after We Are for the Dark, his collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard and some of the press quotes would tend to suggest that its publication was not regarded as the seismic event which, to our keen eyes, it now appears. ("Mr. Aickman can certainly write," opines The Observer, before presumably going on to note that Mr. Aickman can also process solids and dress himself, just like a big boy.) Bar the dull "The Waiting Room", everything in here is first-rate, with a special mention going to the criminally under-rated "A Choice of Weapons", which as far as I know has only appeared in this volume and Tartarus's Collected Works. The Waiting Room - We'll get this 12-page filler out of the way first, before going on to discuss the important stuff. There's certainly nothing particularly bad about this tale of a man who misses his train and is forced to spend the night in the station waiting-room, built on the site of the burial ground of the old gaol, but it's rather genteel, and tends to remind the reader of some of the duller Victorian tales which occasionally found their way into the Fontana Great Ghost Stories series, which Aickman was editing at the time. The View - Carried over from the Howard collaboration. It was later revised by Aickman for Painted Devils, a "best-of" aimed at the American market, but I've just realised I've never actually read the original version, so I'd better do so before commenting any further. More to follow...
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Post by dem on Feb 21, 2009 3:05:27 GMT
I don't think i've ever read a negative comment in regard to The Waiting Room before and I have to admit, it did nothing for me the one and only time I read it. I rarely understand what Aickman is getting at (if he can be accused of trying to get at anything at all), but Waiting Room is the one story I can think of that bored me. I might find something like The Cicerones baffling, but it certainly isn't dull, just above my head.
Enjoyed your review of the Elizabeth Jane Howard book which has set me to digging out Perfect Love for a re-read (once I've finished the tongue-less horse nasty i'm currently preoccupied with!). Did Howard write every word of the three stories attributed to her in We Are For The Dark or was there some collaboration between the pair on each others work?
Oh, and I can scan that Fontana Dark Entries cover into your post if you want?
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Post by PeterC on Feb 21, 2009 13:54:47 GMT
Anybody interested in the Aickman/Howard relationship can find out a lot more in Howard's memoir Slipstream , published by Macmillan in 2002.
I bought this specifically for the extensive coverage of Aickman. On page 177, Howard describes her first sight of Aickman, who was later to become her lover:
'He was unprepossessing; he had thick horn-rimmed spectacles through which his smal brown eyes looked out with an almost cynical intelligence, thick brown hair scraped back from the forehead and held firmly in place with a good deal of brylcreem. he had a large, but not insensitive, mouth and a pale, almost colourless complexion. He had beautiful hands, and a voice whiose tone implied, with some irony, that he thought little of anything apart from the arts.'
I wrote to Howard about Aickman and her letter back to me suggested that she found him rather spoilt, expecting to be waited upon all the time. She also also implied that it was through her good offices that he managed to get his early work published.
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Post by jonathan122 on Feb 21, 2009 16:22:01 GMT
The School Friend - Sally and Mel, "the bright girls of the school", both return to their childhood home town around the same time as the death of Sally's father, the reclusive Dr. Tessler. Whilst Mel moves back in with her parents, Sally takes up residence in her father's old house, and quickly starts to deteriorate, until she is hospitalised after stepping out in front of a lorry. Tests reveal that she is pregnant...
A very unsettling story, which reaches a fine climax when Sally drags Mel towards Dr. Tessler's library, from which strange animal cries are heard: "Do you love children, Mel? Would you like to see my baby?"
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Post by jonathan122 on Feb 21, 2009 16:25:37 GMT
Oh, and I can scan that Fontana Dark Entries cover into your post if you want? That'd be great, thanks. |
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Post by jonathan122 on Mar 5, 2009 1:35:53 GMT
A Choice of Weapons - A masterpiece, and sadly a little-known one, even among Aickman fans. You should seek it out. You'll like it.
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 6, 2009 23:45:07 GMT
Enjoyed your review of the Elizabeth Jane Howard book which has set me to digging out Perfect Love for a re-read (once I've finished the tongue-less horse nasty i'm currently preoccupied with!). Did Howard write every word of the three stories attributed to her in We Are For The Dark or was there some collaboration between the pair on each others work? Mark Samuels of this parish posted the following extract from Aickman's autobiography "The River Runs Uphill" over at Thomas Ligotti Online (hope you don't mind me pinching this Mark  ): "Jonathan Cape published We Are for the Dark, a collection of six original ghost stories by Elizabeth Jane Howard and me. Though we touched up each other's contributions (the spoof obituary notice from The Times in Jane's terrifying tale Perfect Love, was written by me), three of the stories were basically hers, and three mine. The book was thus not a full collaboration. and subsequently we have both disengaged our names from the other's works....
Many of the critics somehow perceived that the book was not the product of a complete collaboration; but, having penetrated so far, they commonly attached the credit for particular stories to the wrong author. Though it was natural that Jane's marvellous Three Miles Up should be attributed to me, as it is concerned with a canal voyage, many of the other errors were almost eerie. If one examined the notices, the two authors appeared not so much to have merged as to have disintegrated. It was extremely odd and confusing."Apart from the waterway connection in "Three Miles Up", I thought that "Perfect Love" seemed like a definite precursor to Aickman's "The School Friend" and "The Visiting Star". I don't actually own a copy of "We Are for the Dark", but I've read all the stories, and it's interesting how they all seem to fit together so well - the train tickets in "The Trains" and "Left Luggage", the gender reversal between "The Trains" and "Three Miles Up", etc. |
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machen
New Face In Hell
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Post by machen on Oct 20, 2011 13:38:35 GMT
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Post by David A. Riley on Oct 20, 2011 14:05:54 GMT
Great link. I'm looking forward to going to the Halifax Ghost Story Festival in November, when Tartarus Press will be releasing We Are For The Dark.
I just put this on the Tartarus Blog:
"I loved this interview for the insights it gave into Aickman's character. I only met him once in the mid 1970's when he was guest of honour at FantasyCon. I was programme organiser that year and had the task of inviting him. He took some persuasion. His GoH speech was perhaps the strangest FantasyCon has ever had. It was all about literary luncheons at Foyles, etc., and Inland Waterways. I don't think he mentioned either his ghost stories once so far as I can remember."
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Post by kuranes on Oct 29, 2011 18:55:23 GMT
Aickman - perhaps the best writer of eerie tales ever.
Some of his stories leave me cold; and not in a good way, either; but when he's at his best, its hard to top him.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Jan 16, 2017 23:56:21 GMT
The School Friend - Sally and Mel, "the bright girls of the school", both return to their childhood home town around the same time as the death of Sally's father, the reclusive Dr. Tessler. Whilst Mel moves back in with her parents, Sally takes up residence in her father's old house, and quickly starts to deteriorate, until she is hospitalised after stepping out in front of a lorry. Tests reveal that she is pregnant... A very unsettling story, which reaches a fine climax when Sally drags Mel towards Dr. Tessler's library, from which strange animal cries are heard: "Do you love children, Mel? Would you like to see my baby?" Jonathan is certainly not wrong there. A very unsettling story indeed. One that meanders along, ever so slightly off-kilter, until Mel's brief glimpse of the gentleman, and the above mentioned animal noises. Very scary. I'd always wanted this collection, because of the (presumably unrelated) Bauhaus single. |
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Post by andydecker on Oct 23, 2020 16:32:26 GMT
I got the collection, and already I am lost.
I quite liked The School Friend (and skipped Ringing the Changes as I had read it in another collection not too lang ago.) The I came to A Choice of Weapons.
While I thought the obession of the hero a bit abrupt, it still was interesting and relatable. But the end left me clueless. What the hell happens? I just didn't get it. Is this opaqueness for its own sake or did I miss something?
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 23, 2020 16:53:31 GMT
Is this opaqueness for its own sake or did I miss something? Probably neither. Think of it as an interesting dream. On the other hand, I remember it as one of Aickman's more overtly symbolic stories, but I would have to read it again in order to be able to spoil it further. |
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Post by andydecker on Oct 23, 2020 20:03:54 GMT
Is this opaqueness for its own sake or did I miss something? Probably neither. Think of it as an interesting dream. On the other hand, I remember it as one of Aickman's more overtly symbolic stories, but I would have to read it again in order to be able to spoil it further. A dream makes sense. It is one of those stories which don't have an end, but just stop. There is nothing to say against an open ending or one open to interpretion. Just those the film has broken endings are sometimes anoying. Aickman really is a challenge sometimes. The School Friend is despite its subtleness rather conventional, and while its ending also is a bit baffling, it gives the reader a kind of sense. A Choice of Weapons is the opposite. |
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Post by johnnymains on Oct 23, 2020 20:59:20 GMT
Aickman is the greatest and worst writer there ever was. Sometimes I just think he was smashed off his face on whatever he could get into his stomach and wrote and wrote loads of shite and still thought it good in the morning. Other times he was as sharp as they came. 'The Stains' in my mind is probably one of the best stories ever written. It is a stone-cold masterpiece. 'The Hospice', 'Ringing the Changes'? Not a word out of place. Just perfect in every way. I'm probably wrong, so therefore right, until I'm wrong again and all meaning has been lost, then found again like an oblique short story that'll be pondered over endlessly or forgotten about. Who cares? What were you saying again?
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